Fox Pundits Suggest A Camera And Lighting Conspiracy Made Clinton Look Better Than Trump At The Debate

Faced with the likelihood that Donald Trump had committed “political suicide” at the debate last night, Fox Business hosts Neil Cavuto and Trish Regan deflected by suggesting there was some kind of conspiracy to make Hillary Clinton look more attractive.

Cavuto started out by saying to Regan, “You mentioned something very interesting at the outset, before anyone. Certainly to me because I was oblivious to it. When the split screen was up, you noticed how different each of them seemed lit and made up and then our crew here was pointing out … just the difference in the look of the type and that the cameras weren’t equally monitored - it’s interesting.

Regan added to the conspiracy:

REGAN: Lighting matters in TV ... What I said to Neil was, did no one from his [Trump’s] team actually go out there and look at that shot? Take a look at it because I don’t know if he just didn’t have any makeup on but, or if it was simply the lights themselves.

She [Clinton] looked phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. The makeup, the hair - all of that terrific. He, on the other hand, really looked as though he bypassed the makeup department. Or it may have just been as simple as the light itself. Did he not get as soft a light?

Cavuto said someone from the crew “pointed out it wasn’t as focused a shot ... it just didn’t seem right. Now, maybe we’re over analyzing that."

Regan noted that a control room has the ability to adjusts the colors of the shot.

“It looked like they were trying to do it mid debate,” Cavuto added.

“It did to me as well,” Regan agreed. “They may have been, as the crew suggested, trying to take, perhaps, some of the orange out of his skin and they over compensated, put too much blue in. … You could tell that there was a difference in the appearance of his shot versus hers and, frankly, it did not compliment him."

Cavuto called Regan’s theory “very interesting.” He added, “A lot of people are going to be talking about it.”

I doubt there was some grand conspiracy to have Trump looking worse than Clinton. Probably the only people who will be talking about it are Trump supporters who think it will help spin Trump’s probably fatal loss in the debate.

Watch it below, from Fox Business Network's post-debate coverage on October 19, 2016.

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Pretty straightforward really. Trump preferred sulking in his room to attending the perfectly normal walk-through before the debate. That’s when they perform sound-checks on the candidates, sort out camera angles and make whatever adjustments are necessary to make their faces look relatively human.

I’d imagine that if he was stomping his tiny (presumably) feet over the pre-checks, he would have given the make-up department little time to touch him up.

If you’d rather rather powder your own nose in private, I guess you take your chances with how you look on camera.

Maybe these Fox “pundits” might want to recall an old saying: “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”

And, to be quite frank, there’s only so much that makeup and lighting can do to help. I doubt the most generous of drag queens with ALL the drag makeup and lighting tricks in her repertoire would be able to make Trump look any better.

I immediately noticed difference in the background shade of blue between the two cameras.

The technical term for making fine adjustments to a tv camera is called “shading.”
Tech’s view a waveform monitor to make sure the balance of black and whites is correct and a vectorscope to make sure all the colors fall into correct alignment.

A large part of the screen mass was taken up by their clothing.
He wore very dark suit and she wore a pope-white suit which would affect the shading.
You’ll also notice she’s under a hair light and he doesn’t appear to be or whatever passes for human hair on him soaks it all up.